Part Two: Stockton Rush: Inventor of the Deathsub | BEHIND THE BASTARDS

"Boss! Dis window is crackin!" "You dumb git! Dat means it's WORKIN! If ya can hear the cracking then yer still alive, an that means the boat ain't sunk!"

I think the thing that annoys me is that if it was a redneck in a modified storage container thinking he was going to dive to the Titanic, no one would have a problem pointing and laughing. Something about their social status (and it's implied education) means that making fun of them gets push back.

A bit of clarification on why the OceanGate marketing called tourists 'crew members' (mission specialists specifically). It's not deflective marketing to make rich people feel important, it's just that if you acknowledge that people on a vessel are there as passengers, all sorts of laws and regulations internationally come into play. If you classify them as crew (even crew with zero responsibilities) you get away with way more reckless shit because there's far fewer laws and way more expectation of risk.

The "youre going to die robot" seems infinitely more cruel than just imploding instantly without knowing it's going to happen

Honestly the only one I felt genuinely bad about on that sub was the teenager. Especially since I read he was scared to get on the thing.

The reason why the game controller is kind of problematic is that you're relying on a bluetooth connection to control a sub. There's really no fallback if the connection fails (which happens all the time when gaming, but nobody gets killed).

I saw an interview with a father and son who were supposed to have been on the fatal voyage but had pulled out. The father was keen to go but his son started looking into OceanGate and stated having doubts about it. When the father pulled out Stockton flew out to meet him to try to talk him back into going. He (Stockton) flew there in his own two seater experimental aircraft that he’d built himself. The father said in the interview that it dawned on him that here was a guy (Stockton) who had flown to see him in an experimental aircraft of his own making, to convince him to get on an experimental submersible. The father realised that Stockton’s perception of risk was very different to his own and that made up his mind not to go. I can’t imagine how dangerous Stockton would have been as a pilot given that his attitude to risk and safety culture was “I’ve don’t this before and it was fine so all these safety rules are unnecessary and just get in the way of me doing what I want to do”.

Another fact about the carbon fibre hull is that it wasn't made by using an autoclave (a pressure oven that compresses everything together and drives out bubbles and other defects). It was apparently done using hand layup around a mandrel. So this thing was made with less effort than is usually used to make carbon fibre bonnets. Edit: Aw yiss, 40K reference!

I'm just here to advocate for a 40K episode, though. I'd watch the hell out of that.

Great episode! Because what OceanGate was doing was illegal (charging passengers to dive at depth in an unclassed sub), they changed the advert narrative from "passengers" to "mission specialists" who were investing in their participation in a "research" expedition in a dangerous experimental vessel.

JFC, that Warhammer 40K joke absolutely killed me

Dude got a lifetime's worth of consequences in less than a second. Spread out your poetic justice, people, life's a bastard.

those interviews with Rush are so hilarious in retrospective that if you told me they weren't real but were instead the product of a bunch of comedians making deep-fakes in a competition to see who could mock him the most, I'd believe it.

There's not much left to learn about Titanic the ship, but it's now a unique marine habitat. There is absolutely stuff worth exploring, just not by idiots like Rush.

I'm a gigantic shipwreck nerd, and I remember when all this went down, I spent...way longer than I probably should've ranting to my dad about how messed up it is that people monetized going down to the Titanic. Maybe it's because my interest in shipwrecks started with the wrecks on Lake Superior, where the conditions are a perfect storm to keep corpses from rising to the surface and to keep people from retrieving the bodies, and it's considered varying degrees of disrespectful to dive a wreck with a body onboard (there's a bit of a double-standard involving the Kamloops, but that's a whole other story), but diving to a shipwreck without good cause feels icky to me. Making an entire business dedicated to taking people down to a shipwreck is even worse, especially because of just how many people died aboard the Titanic, and especially when said business cuts more corners than a shitty origami artist. It's like running tours of Arlington Cemetery where you get to ignore the footpaths and trample all over the graves. I'm probably getting a little too worked up about this, but tl;dr diving to a lethal shipwreck for funsies is morally icky, profiting off of diving to said wreck is twice as bad, and Stockton Rush was an overly-cocky moron who had it coming for more than just his arrogance.

Stockton's predilection for carbon fiber seems to go back to the small engine plane he built. The story he allegedly told was that everyone said it wasn't safe to build a plane out of composite materials and he proved them wrong. It seems he had a chip on his shoulder about 'expert opinion' by the time he got to building subs. High levels of Dunning Krueger.

Like Quinctillius Varus (he of the Varian disaster, where an influential Roman lawyer lost several legions to the German tribes in 9 AD), the judge who thought "maybe I should go on this thing" may be a judge, but she is not a judge of men. A final note: a popular trope refers to "eating the rich." Well, if they could speak, I'm sure the creatures living at the bottom of the Atlantic near the Titanic would love to thank Stockton Rush for the extra meal of human sauce they got that day. Essentially, that's what everyone in that thing became when it imploded. Yay, Ayn Rand!

To be honest, dying in incredibly inaccessible places is one of the less harmful rich person obsessions. I say all the billionaires who want to die 4,000m under the ocean or 8,000m up in the Himalayas should be able to do it.

I love that there's a Titanic judge who judges things about the Titanic

He should have called his company and submersible “Heaven’s Gate.”